The Long Duel

1/11/2014

Just…long… Run of the mill historical adventure yarn set on India’s North-West Frontier during the British Raj. Yul Brynner plays rebel tribesman Sultan who is pursued by Brit copper Freddy Young (Trevor Howard), who while chasing down the enigmatic rebel comes to respect him and is unwilling to execute the justice requested by his superiors. The intent to make an historical epic of some worth, that is based on facts, is honourable. It looks nice with an authentic feel to the surroundings of the story, if only it wasn’t so laboured, so full of inane posturing and poorly scripted characters, then it might just about crawl its way to being just above average. It rarely excites, director Ken Annakin unable to inject life into the more perkier aspects of plotting, and a cast that

11/11/2022

"Sultan" (Yul Brynner) leads his largely peaceable tribe as the days of the Raj increasingly impose themselves on their day-to-day living. Imprisoned after a raid, they manage to break out of the fort but one of their guards is killed, This serves to galvanise the Governor (Maurice Denham) to appoint a solider tasked with apprehending this man before his disorder spreads. To that end he engages the rather unpopular but effective "Capt. Young" (Trevor Howard). What now ensues are a series of cat-and-mouse escapades as each man vies for the upper hand. The story of a principled man fighting for freedom against the oppressor is quite effective and both Brynner and Howard are on reasonable form as the two characters begin to respect each other, but the rest of the cast - especially the sterile